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Comment by pkghost | Hacker News Reader

What value does HFT create?

HFT provides liquidity which reduces everyone else's cost and/or exposure to short term risk.

Low-latency trading though costs everyone. Nobody actually needs anything faster than a fill in a blink of an eye. The only people who think they do really need smarter match engines or to stop taking advantage of people

Where does short-term risk come from? And what's the difference between HFT and LLT?

If anyone knows of good high-level reading material on the subject, I'd appreciate a link so I can spare you more dumb questions.

I admit to having drunk some of Mark Cuban's Kool-Aid, as well as Jon Stewart's and that of some other liberal sources. Their argument, as far as I understand, is that HFT doesn't provide value proportionate with that which it extracts from a system designed to connect investors with entrepreneurs.

The idea has an appealing simplicity, especially given recent history, but don't know very much about markets, so I thought I'd ask people on the other side of the debate for their take.

That's a very important question to ask and I myself would like to get a response from some of the readers who're hacking away at it, instead of having you get downvoted.

How does one prevent a catastrophy that may result from "rogue algorithms" that are far worse than Infinium's? And is such risk truly worth it?

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